The enrichment of the museum at Zermatt with relics of
Edward Whymper, greatest of British Alpinists, recalls, in a year in which fatal climbing accidents have been unusually numerous, one of the worst of all Alpine tragedies. The interest of the Zermatt ceremony the other day lay in the fact that Whymper's daughter, Mrs. Blandy, was present, and also the grandson of one of the guides who accompanied Whymper on the fatal ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865, when Lord Francis Douglas, two other Englishmen and a guide lost their lives. By an odd co- incidence, the Visitors' Book at the Hotel Mont-Rose (rendezvous of all the notable English climbers—Whymper, Tyndall, Leslie Stephen and the rest) for the years 1858-65 had been lost for several years, and was found at the bottom of a cupboard just a day or two before the arrival of Mrs. Blandy to present a portrait of her father and other documents concerning him. But two pages, on which Whymper had written the tragic story of July 13th, 1865, had been torn out by some unknown vandal.
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